The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

First of all, thanks to everyone who played along with our little April Fool's prank a couple of weeks back. I apologize if we made our fake Future Rank tool seem a little too real. As penance, I thought I would offer a sneak peek at an actual upcoming feature that is still in the advanced planning stages.

So, What Is It?

The SERP Analysis report is a deep and detailed report that shows the top ten ranking URLs for a particular keyword, retrieves a breadth of potential ranking signals, and presents them in a format that is easy to analyze at a glance. The tool is meant to help SEOs better compare and analyze the factors that may lie behind why particular sites rank in the top ten for certain keywords.

Well, this isn't exactly what the full user interface will look like, but this is the format we plan to use within the report. I've included a tiny version of the full report at the top (with a link to the complete spreadsheet), and broken it down below. (Note: the data is old, and a bit munged, but accurate enough to offer a flavor for what we plan to build.)

Warning: you may have to pull out your reading glasses to see this onscreen. (I recommend hitting ctrl-+ in your browser window a couple of times.)

While the metrics for a single section often won't answer the question "why is that ranking first?", looking holistically at all of them will do that most of the time. For example, I was looking at the ninth-ranking result, noting that it seemed to dominate most of the link metrics, and wondered why it ranked below its competitors. Looking further to on-page metrics, it was easy to see that this page has not optimized for the keyword, which is probably why it falls where it does (and why it might improve if the site owner decided to focus on the keyword on-page).

Showing Summary Results

Since it will likely take some time to generate a full report, we plan to also show a summary of data as a quick view. The version we have planned at the moment includes the following elements:

Page Authority

Total Links

Linking Root Domains

Domain Authority

Percent of Linking Root Domains with Exact Match Anchor Text

It would look something like this:

This does not include all of the metrics that I would want to include, like on-page score or social metrics, but these should all be retrievable real-time and provide some high-level value before the full report is run.

Why Build a Tool To Generate These Reports?

I've heard from many SEOs that one of their more time-consuming tasks is generating complex spreadsheets to analyze why certain sites are ranking well for specific SERPs and to discover opportunities to improve a target site's ranking. For many, this has proven to be a tedious process of data gathering from multiple sources followed by lots of data entry. Our goal is to take the manual work out of creating these reports and provide that data in an easily consumable way.

Why Are Certain Metrics Missing from This Report?

I imagine that while you were looking through these tables, you noted some important metrics that are absent. Some of these metrics are not ours to provide, like Page Rank. Others are just not ready or available for mass consumption yet, such as LDA score.

Where Will These Reports Live?

We plan to offer this report, both as part of the Keyword Difficulty tool and as a replacement for the basic SERP analysis on the Ranking History Reports in your campaigns.

What Can I Do To Make This Feature Better?

Glad you asked! I'm certain that there are many other great metrics that we could or should include. So if you see something that is totally missing, wonder why in the world we included a certain data point, or think that representing anchor metrics in purple is ridiculous, let us know. We'd love to hear your thoughts!

About adamf —

Adam is the Chief Product Officer at Moz. In his spare time he tries to keep up with his young kids and teach them the merits of intelligent web design and agile methodologies.

My 2cents... as it seems from the preliminary datas from the ranking survey that links from unique C-Block domains are more important than unique domain names themselves... why don't you put also that metric in the summary?

Look forward for this tool, it's really needed, especially for indipendent consultant like me for whom time is literally gold.

Also, how about general link profile, like.... total # of links from Forums, Blogs, Bookmarking sites, etc . May be even # of citations or mentions of a brand/domain without an actual link would be useful - as thats a good brand reach indicator and possibly a ranking factor as well.

I think I see what you are saying here. Even though a score like Domain Authority takes the number of linking root domains into account as a factor, I could see how it would be interesting to see which domains with a DA scores in the 70s rely on LRDs for their high score.

I'm not sure this is something we would add by default, but something for us to consider.

Yep, totally understand DA takes this into account - But as you say, some sites might have greater quantity from lower quality to reach the same DA as a site with lower quantity higher quality etc.

We actually find this one of the most effective ways to see a manipulated link graph.

If a site has a huge spike of sub DA10's its often down to directory/low quality articles. Or if a site has LOTS of very high DA sites it might show they have built links from DA (or pagerank X) and above etc.

It's not always about the highest DA, this can help point you in the direction of where in the link graph you might be missing links IMO.

Thanks for the deeper explanation - this makes a lot of sense. This sort of link profile for each site would be really cool. I don't see this happening for V1, but could definitely see us looking at this for a subsequent release.

Something I was wondering when reading this: you could use all the data gathered for the benefit of us all.

What I mean is, if you keep collecting all our results in a huge database, you could research the correlation between a certain statistic and the rank in Google. If enough data is collected, this might give you pretty exact numbers as to how important each statistic is to Google. I for one would love to see those results.

After looking at data all day I cringe when I think of this report. I know how valuable that data visualization, but I am still waiting for something that makes it so that we don't have to look at it "hollistically" to get inferences. I know that this is the holly grail of SEO, but what I would really like to see more of in the SEOmoz tools is a confidence rating for the data that is shown.

What I mean by this is that mozranks appear to be dramatically skewed for website that use specific linking tactics. I.E. do follow blog commenting or link exchange tends to give massive increases in moz rankings. If you guys could give confidence intervals of the quality of the link profile based on some metrics it would help a lot.

I don't need more tools, I need more accurate tools! It still drives me nuts when I see a perfectly optimized page with lots of anchor text from lots of unique domains and a high moz rank that gets outranked by site with a miniscule profile. I am mainly ranting cause I have been looking at data all day. I can't wait to use the tool your developing. I would like to see additional work on improving the reliability of the data as opposed to ways it can be presented.

I wonder how much impact this readily generated data will have on the industry as a whole. Granted, anyone could create something similar if they had 10+ hrs to spare, but to get this detailed of a report without the heavy workload will greatly improve efficiency and likely increase the amount of actual optimization that can be done (vs. analytic/research work).

This looks like a beautiful tool, I wasn't sold till I realized the potential of the heatmaps to save time. We can always still do this in excel for detailed analysis, but it'll be nice to have a solid preliminary available with a few clicks.

(2) An overall score/percentage that takes into account all the factors you're looking at and assigns an overall metric to it (obviously the pitfall of this is that, it would stop people looking at the data and instead running quick and dirty report without looking at the data, but on the plus side can save a lot of time and give a give overview!) Keep up the good work guys ;) J.

I'm afraid this is taking a little longer than hoped to complete. I apologize for the overpromise here. We are working hard to have this done as soon as possible in June. In the interim, the new Firefox toolbar update has an feature which allows a .csv export from any search engine result page including a good amount of Linkscape data.

First, thank you for consitently making my job easier! This will be an extremely valuable tool and will shave a lot of time off of research and data entry.

I would like... no... LOVE, to have it so you can monitor the serp result overtime for changes in ranking, linking C-Blocks, velocity at which links are being built, etc. I know this would be resource intensive, but it would be freakin awesome!

Wow. It's almost like I should check with you guys first before I begin work on a new tool here. Mine gave me the quick snapshot similary to your summary data tab, but I may just scrap it all together and use this new analysis report. Always impressed with how nimble you guys are. I constantly find myself building things on my own just to get the job done. Working in large companies, sometimes it takes forever to get anything done. Here's another vote for a great tool that saves us time.

can you please enable that for SERPs for all competitors but also how just your domain represents it's self in the SERPs for that keyword... but certainly be able to have a slider to move between date periods to see how various elements change....

Thanks! A .csv is our first priority so people can customize reports with metrics we might not include. That being said, we will look also at adding a pdf report, though this will probably fall out of scope for a first release.

I know that this will probably be a tough technical nut to crack. but how cool would it be if it offers suggestions like you just did.Example: this site's really weak when it comes to on-page optimization when compared to the other top 10 results.It would be the data put in words so some of the thought process (not everything) is done for you. It would be a great feature for SEO rookies.

I already do this, but it looks like you make it a lot prettier than I do. I pour the data into a spreadsheet. I have some thoughts about what other variables that may help move the dial up or down, but then again, it's my own "secret sauce." It's why I can charge all those extra dimes more than my competitors. ;)

Seriously, I'll share my thoughts in more detail when I get a moment here, but glad someone is finally building something like this.

However, I would like to see you guys build more link building management tools that are being somewhat dominated by the likes of Raven and SEMrush. I wouldn't question my $99/mo investment at times if you had something like that.

I am giving Oscar award to final summary. I am working on such websites from scratch level. All SEO stuffs are included over there...But, few websites is not giving me facility to make changes as per SEO requirement. But, I have no worry about it. I jump in to some best practice to gather exact keyword anchor links & developing links from good page rank website. I just check page rank of website. Because, Google have done too many work on this tool & I trust on it. :) I always focus to gather links from good page rank websites. It works!! & give me result....That's it...

Can you guys add a feature to find out which sites are possibly buying links in your SERP analysis report or if link buyer label is too rude then just highlight them as sites with un-natural/very un-natural link profiles.

If the back link profile is natural, then the maximum no. of root domains will contain the domain/brand/product name or its variations as the anchor text. If maximum number of root domains contains industry keywords then something is wrong. So say If you find a business site named 'ABC limited', majority of people will naturally refer/link out to it as 'ABC limited' and not as 'cheap car insurance'. It should not be difficult for you guys to detect such artificial back link profiles as you can already do anchor text distribution analysis of a domain through open site explorer.So instead of figuring out how to beat a domain which has acquired 1000 backlinks with exact match anchor text from the home page of 700+ unique c-block domains, i would be busy hitting the 'report spam' button or if not hitting the button i can at least convince clients that this is something not possible without buying links.

Definitely an interesting suggestion. I don't see us going past our direction in the nearterm of presenting the data and information to help parse out what it might mean. So we will certainly show the exact match and partial match anchor text, as well as the percentage match, but I don't think we are going to make that direct judgement call as to whether we think a link profile is suspect - doing so programmatically could be very error-prone. If this is what you are investigating, however, we certainly hope to make that investigation easier.